https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsryeaOpLTY
Monday, December 22, 2025
From the River to the Ocean, Trump Erases Lines in the Sand
- IAN WILLIAMS
- REGIONS
- NORTH AMERICA
- POSTED ON
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2026, pp. 72-73
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
MANY PEOPLE WONDER if the U.N. is galloping toward irrelevance. As an institution for enforcing the global rule of law, the United States has buried it at the crossroads with a stake through its heart. Security Council resolutions 2803 on Gaza and 2797 on Western Sahara would shame a kangaroo court. No less than 13 members voted for resolutions that ripped up the core U.N. principle that countries must not acquire territory by force. It left China and Russia, the two abstentions, as relative paladins of international law.
However, it is an inadvertent testament to the perceived significance of the U.N. that the United States and Israel still feel the need to coerce its organs into ratifying their illegalities. Like the fading fairy Tinker Bell in Peter Pan, the U.N.’s strength depends on enough people or governments asserting their belief in it. At times like these, however, belief in fairies is almost more understandable than faith in the U.N.
Resolution 2803 on Gaza marked a new nadir in the attritional abdication of the U.N.’s powers, prestige and prerogatives. Within days, most of the same 13 assenting countries piously voted in the General Assembly reasserting Palestine’s right to self-determination, even though the Council resolution they had earlier voted for had torpedoed the principle. Resolution 2803 provides a mist of legality for the United States and its allies as the de facto occupying force of Gaza, while leaving Israel as the unilateral arbiter on whether the Gazans are fulfilling the obligations that the resolution imposed upon them.
The U.N.’s core dogma banning the acquisition of territory by force was a reaction to Munich 1938, so it is worth noting that this peace plan gives the Palestinians less effective input and sovereignty than the Nazi protectorate in Prague gave the Czechs. It violates the U.N.’s own charter and its founding principles, not least about self-determination and non-aggression, while ignoring a huge corpus of Security Council and General Assembly decisions, not to mention International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings.
Far from naming the perpetrator, it hands over effective control to the number one accomplice in genocide, whose presidential family is almost publicly drooling over its real estate interests and development plans for the re-creation of the original Zionist myth of “a land without a people.” Equally intriguing is the relative silence about Mahmoud Abbas’ endorsement of the plan, since by implication that means “the Palestinians” approve. This reticence to crow about it is tacit acknowledgment that Abbas and his unelected clique represent no one. Only someone who really does believe in fairies would expect the International Stabilization Force to impede the Israeli Occupation Force’s depredations impartially, rather than enforcing Israeli terms on the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, members abdicated all power to the United States, while haunting in the background is Tony Blair (“the ghost of crises past”), apparently Trump’s first choice to act as Israeli stoolie in the ruins of the devastated ghetto.
RESOLUTION 2797 ON WESTERN SAHARA
The Gaza resolution oozes in the wake of Security Council Resolution 2797 on Western Sahara, in some ways an even more explicit repudiation of the norms of international law than the resolution on Gaza. With Council members publicly masticating on their own previous decision, 2797 was a dress rehearsal for the 2803 tragedy and is even more chilling as a precedent for the U.N. and international law.
Longtime U.S. envoy to the Arab world Ambassador Chris Ross was U.N. special representative for Western Sahara, joining a roster that included James Baker and John Bolton, with whom he shared increasing exasperation with Moroccan stone-walling. Resolution 2797 is, he told the Washington Report, “a step backward. Until now, negotiations on Western Sahara were based on resolutions that, since 2007, have mentioned both the Moroccans’ autonomy proposal and the Polisario’s referendum proposal. Even at the beginning, there was a slight tilt toward the Moroccan proposal, which was described as ‘credible,’ but in this latest resolution, there is a very heavy tilt toward Morocco, in that its autonomy proposal is declared to be ‘a sound basis for negotiation.’”
In fact, although the Polisario strongly supported the referendum, it is not their proposal. It was based on ICJ rulings reiterated by countless U.N. resolutions that the people of Western Sahara were entitled to self-determination and all parties, including Morocco and the U.N., agreed that this should be through a referendum. The task of the 35-year-old U.N. peacekeeping force, MINURSO, was to assist and oversee the vote. Morocco’s mission has been to thwart the referendum since it realized it would lose.
Now, whipped in by the White House, the British have joined Morocco’s longtime patron France to vote for this endorsement of the Moroccan “autonomy” proposal, which is thinly camouflaged cover for annexation. It gives the Sahrawis even less independence than Israel would grant Gaza.
What Craig Mokhiber, former U.N. human rights lawyer, said about 2802 covers 2797 as well. He concluded that “the Security Council may have, on occasion, drafted resolutions that cross the margins between what it is able to do and what international law requires. But I can’t think of a case where it has so completely crossed those lines so significantly in such a substantive way; where it effectively had to dismiss the entire body of international law in order to pass Donald Trump’s dictate into a Security Council resolution.”
It sets the stage for a confrontation with the ICJ, which Mokhiber says “has always been very deferential to the Council. One of the design flaws of the U.N. is that if the Council goes rogue, we have no protection. I don’t know how they could do (the resolution) without declaring the thing outright illegal, and that is unlikely, because they don’t have the power of judicial review over the Security Council.”
As currently accepted, the Security Council is the law. The veto has been a double-edged sword: it often stops the Council from taking effective action, but it has also prevented unilateral powers rewriting international law. In both these resolutions, no matter how anomalously, China and Russia have stood up for accepted international law if only to the extent of expressing their reservation and abstaining. But to borrow James Baker’s phrase, they did not have a dog in the fight and were not prepared to tweak the tail of the American Eagle with a veto on either Gaza or the Sahara.
Morocco’s diplomatic effort has been relentless, much like Indonesia’s for many years over its similar annexation of East Timor. Indonesia eventually succumbed to international pressure and let Timor Leste go. However, Morocco has a U.S. president on its side who sees the world in terms of beachfront property, not high principle, so after years of (often reluctantly) holding up international law in the face of Moroccan demands, the U.S. representatives are selling the pass, perhaps for a beachfront property. Of course, to return to where we were, it helps that even before the Abrahamic Accords, Israel and the Moroccan regime were as close as they could be, allowing for massive popular support for Palestine.
Ominously there have been suggestions that Palestinians could be removed from Gaza and resettled in Western Sahara. It seems far-fetched at the moment, but so was idea of resettling Palestine with Zionists prior to 1948. And a few years ago, it would have been considered far-fetched that the United States would be so munificent giving away other people’s territory, but the Golan Heights, the West Bank and large portions of Ukraine and now, Western Sahara suggest that its generosity knows no bounds.
A Munich a month is a worrying prospect, not least if we remember what followed 1938.
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